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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects question about lens distorition?

  • Eddy Rose

    February 28, 2011 at 11:40 pm

    hmmmmm well getting that exact effect is gonna be tricky you will prolly have you use multiple layers and more than one technique.

    I’d say you sound DEFINITELY look into Video Copilot’s Optical Flares. They have a ton of insanely customizable lens flares you could use to make those long streaks and fat hotspots.
    (However don’t forget that over still footage all your lens flares will be stationary so you will need move them around a bit or add a camera to look convincing.)

    You’ll also want to have streaky light coming OUT of the luminance of your footage (the bright places like the guy’s face, the lights in the back etc.). For that I can think of two things: 1.) Use a plugin like Trapcode Starglow, set it to luma, and set it to just produce vertical streaks (SG does does h&v streaks by default). 2.)If you’re poor you can try duplicating your layer, setting the vertical scale of the top copy through the roof, and setting the transfer mode of the top layer to something like screen. Yo’ll prolly have to do alot of tinkering with the second option (levels etc.) but it’s worth a shot.

  • Leo Lagerwall

    March 1, 2011 at 12:02 am

    Thank you so much for the quick answer…Right now Im experimenting with different kind layers and overlay effects… Im adding some directional blur and trying to smooth the overlaying layers with some masks.

    If I succeed in doing some nice lighting effects I will post the material later on.

    I will look into the plugin you suggested…

    Thanks again!

  • Eddy Rose

    March 1, 2011 at 12:08 am

    oo directional blurs,, good idea! Why didn’t I think of that I love directional blurs! 😛

  • Tudor “ted” jelescu

    March 1, 2011 at 10:13 pm

    For your blurs- try to key out the lighter areas of your image and then invert the mask, apply vertical blur and comp on top of your clip using blend modes like it was previously suggested.

    Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
    Senior VFX Artist

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